We all know the conference is down, star power is down, and so is the economy. So it probably shouldn't be a big surprise that attendance is down in Pac-10 basketball from last season.

Eight of the 10 teams are averaging fewer fans than they did last season, including five teams that are down by more than 1,000 fans per game and two down by more than 2,000.

The two teams that are ahead of pace from last season? Oregon State and Washington.

Some of the drop can be explained by the fact that it's so early in conference play. Usually, teams draw a little better during conference, so some of the differences should even out as the season goes on.

(A note here that the numbers I used for Oregon State are different from the ones the Pac-10 had on its Web site Sunday. The conference lists OSU's home conference attendance as 7,472 for two games. That was the attendance for Saturday's game against Arizona State. OSU also drew 6,746, but because the figure is not listed on OSU's boxscore, it was not added to the total for the Pac-10's stats.)

Here's how teams rank by improvement, along with other two other rankings:Rank by comparison between this season and last